Lattice gas simulations of two-dimensional liquid foams

Liquid foam is a dense random packing of gas bubbles in a small amount of immiscible liquid containing surfactants. The liquid within the Plateau borders, although small in volume, causes considerable difficulties to investigations of the physical properties of foams, and the situation becomes even more complicated if the flow of the liquid through the foam is considered too. Here we propose a fresh approach to tackling these issues by introducing a discrete two-dimensional hybrid lattice gas model of liquid foams. While lattice gas models have been used to model two-phase liquids in the past, their application to the study of liquid foams is novel and proves promising. We represent bubble surfaces by a finite number of nodes, and model the surrounding liquid as a lattice gas (with a finite number of liquid particles). The gas in the bubbles is treated as an ideal gas at constant temperature. The model is tested by choosing an arbitrarily shaped bubble that evolves into a circular shape in agreement with Laplaces law. The model is then employed to simulate periodic ordered and disordered dry and wet foams. Since our model is specifically designed to handle wet foams up to a critical liquid fraction of 0.16 (void fraction of random packing of disks), we are able to compute the variation in coordination number (average number of neighbours of a bubble) over the whole range of liquid fractions, and we find it to be a linear function of the shear modulus.This paper was presented at the first Annual European Rheology Conference (AERC) held in Guimarães, Portugal, 11–13 September 2003.